Female buddy-buddy movies - what a relief. No car chases, no heads being blown off in slow motion, no machine-tooled one-liners that are meant as a hymn to the hero's masculinity but instead highlight his insecurity. Not that female buddy-buddy movies can't be about girls with guns. Thelma and Louise, the classic that revived the genre once known - and derided - as the "women's picture", starred two pistol-packin' mamas, with a much- praised guest appearance by a would-be rapist's corpse. But what the women's picture invariably has is what most action flicks and all summer blockbusters studiously avoid: a sense of life lived, choices made, ordinary detail, the psychological interior. You know, the girlie show...

The country was going to the dogs long before Blur's Damon Albarn revealed his penchant for greyhounds, and today, callow, mockney pretenders can rub shoulders with old-school sheepskinned enthusiasts for one of the high spots of the canine calendar (above). For the best views, head for the Stadium Grandstand. But if you fancy reclining in comfort, repair to the Diamond Room for a pint and a flutter. Races last around 28 seconds, as the Kate Mosses of the dog world break from their traps and dash after those rabbit rags in a bid for doggy glory.

How to be a literary manager: Go to the movies. Theatres don't programme plays any more, they just put on stage versions of classic films. Find a masterpiece and massacre it appears to be the idea. Tommy Steele did it twice. Not content with tampering with the sublime Singin' in the Rain, he then insisted on touring Some Like It Hot (and nearly bankrupted his producers into the bargain) while Simon Callow came a cropper with Les Enfants du Paradis. That debacle was a molehill when compared with the towering horrors of Carrie the musical which lost its leading lady, Barbara Cook, when she walked out after having nearly been decapitated by the set.

It is always refreshing when a provincial gallery pulls off a coup and the Abbot Hall Gallery's current Lucian Freud show in Kendall, Cumbria, is just that. While in many ways a thinned-out version of the hugely successful 1992 exhibition which toured Japan, this can hardly be called a major retrospective - around 40 paintings in all. What we do have here, though, is an attractive and well-selected exhibition which neatly charts the career of the painter acclaimed by some as our "greatest living artist".

The opening this week of the summer exhibition at the Royal Academy, calls to mind one of the few highlights of last year's show - a pair of vivid semi-abstract paintings by Barbara Rae. The fact that these works continue to haunt the mind is sufficient proof of the considerable power and presence of this important, though still relatively unknown British painter.

Sometimes a movie is all incidentals. Sometimes it has to be. From Dusk to Dawn (below right), for instance, bills itself as a vampire flick, but has absolutely nothing to add to cinema's vampire lore, while its plot - or plots - are shamelessly borrowed from Cape Fear and The Evil Dead, the latter stitched to the former in a manner Baron Frankenstein might consider crude.